Comment on Good FOSS design software for beginners?
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Do yourself a favor:
Use Onshape until you are comfortable and confident with your CAD work. Onshape’s design is much more industry standard (I think it is derived from Solidworks?) and pretty much all of the workflows and terminology are similar. Contrast that with FreeCad where a lot of tools have very specific names and some are split out into two.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaTNTUzA5dM is a great video on the subject. Just… watch at like 1.25x-1.5x speed because Deltahedra has a very specific speaking cadence and… yeah. But a great example is the mindset of extrude (positive or negative) versus having to decide if you are padding or pocketing. It isn’t a huge difference once you know what you are doing but it can really trip people up when they are learning the ropes.
FreeCAD is an excellent second (or third) CAD tool. I strongly discourage anyone from making it their first.
The other side is to make actual models in Blender. Blender… I actually like blender a lot. I don’t have enough of a background to know if the workflows are meaningfully diffeernt as my experience is limited to using one tool decades ago (might have been Maya?) for making models for UT before switching to Blender. Just understand that Blender is more for making “art” rather than functional parts.